The Eschatological Imagination

Space, Time, and Experience (1300–1800)

Wietse De Boer, Christine Göttler (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

532 Seiten

2024
Brill (Verlag)
978-90-04-68809-4 (ISBN)

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This book explores how early-modern Christian eschatology understood the cosmological dimensions of space and time, and how ideas, representations, and practices concerning the afterlife evolved as the scientific breakthroughs of the time became matters of common knowledge.

How did the early-modern Christian West conceive of the spaces and times of the afterlife? The answer to this question is not obvious for a period that saw profound changes in theology, when the telescope revealed the heavens to be as changeable and imperfect as the earth, and when archaeological and geological investigations made the earth and what lies beneath it another privileged site for the acquisition of new knowledge.

With its focus on the eschatological imagination at a time of transformation in cosmology, this volume opens up new ways of studying early-modern religious ideas, representations, and practices. The individual chapters explore a wealth of – at times little-known – visual and textual sources. Together they highlight how closely concepts and imaginaries of the hereafter were intertwined with the realities of the here and now.

Contributors: Matteo Al Kalak, Monica Azzolini, Wietse de Boer, Christine Göttler, Luke Holloway, Martha McGill, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Laurent Paya, Raphaèle Preisinger, Aviva Rothman, Minou Schraven, Anna-Claire Stinebring, Jane Tylus, and Antoinina Bevan Zlatar.

Wietse de Boer is the Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History at Miami University (Ohio). His research interests are focused on Italian religious and cultural history (15th–17th centuries). His books include The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (2001; Italian trans. 2004) and Art in Dispute: Catholic Debates at the Time of Trent (2021). Christine Göttler is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Bern. Her research interests focus on the intersections between art, natural philosophy, and religion, the relationship between landscape and nature, and early modern notions of materiality and immateriality. Her publications include the monograph Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (2010).

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Notes on the Editors

Notes on the Contributors

1 The Space-Time Dimension of Early Modern Eschatology: An Introduction

Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler

Part 1: Cosmology and Eschatology

2 Depicting the Universal Conflagration: Time, Space, and Artifice in Peter Paul Rubens’s Fall of the Damned

Christine Göttler

3 A Castle in the Air? Space, Time, and Sensation in Gabriel de Henao’s Empyreologia

Wietse de Boer

4 Kepler’s Somnium as Purgatorial Journey

Aviva Rothman

Part 2: Underlands and Netherworlds

5 The Birth of Hell: An Angel, His Fall, and His Reign among Us

Matteo Al Kalak

6 ‘Oh, How Unlike the Place from Whence They Fell!’ John Milton’s Primordial Hell in Paradise Lost

Antoinina Bevan Zlatar

7 God’s Underlands: Athanasius Kircher’s Epic Journey in the Mundus Subterraneus

Monica Azzolini

Part 3: Visions of Heaven and Hell

8 Ecstatic Visions: The Eschatological Imagination of Spanish Mystic Juana de la Cruz (d. 1534)

Minou Schraven

9 Describing the Inconceivable in Eighteenth-Century Methodist and Quaker Visions of the Afterlife

Martha McGill and Luke Holloway

10 From the Isle of Patmos to the Territory of the Plumed Serpent: Eschatological Imaginations Sparked by the Virgin of Guadalupe in Colonial New Spain

Raphaèle Preisinger

Part 4: Spiritual Reckoning and Refuge

11 Pondering Mary: Michelangelo’s Farewell to Dante

Jane Tylus

12 The Calvinist Theatre of God as a Pleasure Garden at the Time of the First French War of Religion (ca. 1560)

Laurent Paya

Part 5: Sites of Purgation, Meditation, and Martyrdom

13 The Desert at the World’s End: Eschatological Space in Van Hemessen’s Hermit Landscapes

Anna-Claire Stinebring

14 ‘Abstracto igitur animo’: Eschatological Image-Making in the Emblematic Spiritual Exercises of Jan David, S.J.

Walter S. Melion

15 The Jesuit Martyrdom Landscape and the Optics of Death

Mia M. Mochizuki

Index Nominum

Erscheinungsdatum	22.11.2024
Reihe/Serie	Intersections ; 96
Verlagsort	Leiden
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	1112 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	90-04-68809-9 / 9004688099
ISBN-13	978-90-04-68809-4 / 9789004688094
Zustand	Neuware